musings, rumblings, pointless fumblings

Menu

Experts: Latest climate report too rosy

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change is about to release a major report on global warming later this week, it’s first report since 2001. The IPCC is considered the definitive source on climate change science, in that it represents the broadest set of data and scientific viewpoints in the world (including scientists from oil producing countries like Saudi Arabia, who are not necessarily inclined to wax dramatic about the dangers). Because of that, the IPCC reports are considered to be rather conservative. And even before the report is released, there’s already a lot of controversy.

Early and changeable drafts of their upcoming authoritative report on climate change foresee smaller sea level rises than were projected in 2001 in the last report. Many top U.S. scientists reject these rosier numbers. Those calculations don’t include the recent, and dramatic, melt-off of big ice sheets in two crucial locations…

The melting ice sheets in Greenland and Antarctica are a fairly recent development that has taken scientists by surprise. They don’t know how to predict its effects in their computer models. But many fear it will mean the world’s coastlines are swamped much earlier than most predict.

Others believe the ice melt is temporary and won’t play such a dramatic role.

Where do they come up with this hypothesis? We’re discovering that climate models were too conservative because they failed to account for faster than anticipated melting and yet they still release a report that excludes the impact of the melting ice sheets?